Sean Barney is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War. He received the Purple Heart for wounds sustained in action in ...more

Sean Barney is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War. He received the Purple Heart for wounds sustained in action in Fallujah, Iraq. He is a partner with the Truman National Security Project and a former adviser to Senator Tom Carper.

According to a recent study, there are very few places in the country where inequality of opportunity is worse than northern Delaware.

In 2014, economists at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, compared levels of intergenerational economic mobility across America. Out of 709 so-called commuting zones – localities that constitute unified labor markets for statistical purposes – the Wilmington area ranked 625th.

A map accompanying the Harvard/Berkeley study reveals that inequality of opportunity remains at its worst in the states of the former Confederacy, whose policies Delaware shared and whose tendencies we have yet to decisively break with. As soon as our state got out from under a post-Brown v. Board of Education court order, Delaware wasted little time in actively resegregating its schools.

As a result, our most disadvantaged children are packed together in racially segregated, high-poverty schools. The percentage of black students enrolled in predominantly non-white schools increased tenfold between 1989 and 2010.

Another recent study suggests Delaware’s unreconstructed inequality casts a dark cloud over our economic future. In 2016, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston went back and looked at the localities in the Harvard/Berkeley study to see whether the differences between them in equality of opportunity affected their economic performance. What they found was that inequality of opportunity severely stunts a locality’s long-term economic prospects.

Over time, localities that do not cultivate equality of opportunity waste vast reserves of human potential. They innovate less. They experience more crime. They became less attractive to employers.

What this means is that if Delaware wants to make Wilmington strong again and put the state on a sustainable economic path, it is imperative that Delawareans for Educational Opportunity prevail in the lawsuit they recently filed to rectify a state education funding system that “often provides more support for children who are well off than it provides for children living in poverty.”

As the complaint points out, the vast majority of states provide additional support for the education of low-income children. Delaware does not. In Delaware, schools with a higher percentage of low-income students receive less state financial support for education on a per-student basis than schools with a lower percentage of low-income students.

The majority of states that have moved to more equitable funding systems over the past 20 years have done so only after lawsuits, the complaint points out. In the absence of courts making it clear that equality of educational opportunity is a matter of justice, not a “maybe” or “perhaps” to be left to legislative horse-trading, state and local legislatures all too often perpetuate inequality.

Those who represent the winners in the system tend to have the upper hand. Experience shows they use it to preserve the status quo.

Delawareans for Educational Opportunity v. Carney hangs on the Delaware Constitution, which guarantees all of Delaware’s children “a general and efficient system of free public schools.” Ironically, the original intent of the framers of this 1897 provision was to create a system of “separate but equal” schools. “[I]n apportionment” of funding, they provided, “no distinction shall be made on account of race or color, and separate schools for white and colored children shall be maintained.”

Delaware over the past generation has thrown in anew with separate. To limit the moral and temporal extent of the state’s retrogression, Delaware’s courts should at least insist on equal.

The legacies of Louis Redding and Chancellor Collins Seitz demand no less. It was an insistence on equal that was the ground on which Chancellor Seitz, in a case brought by Redding, made constitutional history 65 years ago. He was the only trial court judge in the various cases ultimately consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education to find unconstitutional the segregated schools challenged before him.

His holding back then was that Delaware’s schools violated “separate but equal” because they were unequal.

That Delaware’s schools today are separate is a given. That they are unequal is obvious.

In the most recent school year, just 12 percent of low-income students in Delaware met the SAT standard for college-readiness in math.

Delaware’s leaders have long been full of ideas for coping with the symptoms Delaware experiences as a result of its enduring and disgraceful inequality of opportunity. It is time that we address the disease itself. We must end Delaware’s longstanding, willful failure to equitably prepare all our children for higher education, for careers, and for lives as fully empowered and fully valued citizens.

Sean Barney is a veteran, a former adviser to U.S. Sen. Tom Carper and Gov. Jack Markell, and a former law clerk to Delaware Supreme Court Justice Collins J. Seitz Jr. He lives with his family in Wilmington, where he serves as an assistant public defender.